Please join us on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10th as we celebrate our
National and Local Peacemaker Award Recipients!

$80 until Sept. 10th

$90 until Oct. 10th

$100 until Nov. 3rd

ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ – our 2019 HPJC National Peacemaker Award Recipient & Keynote SpeakerRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of tenant farmers. Her grandfather, a white settler of Scots-Irish heritage, land-owning farmer, and veterinarian, was active in the Oklahoma Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th Century. Her historical memoir, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, tells that story. Relocating to San Francisco, she graduated in History from San Francisco State University and began graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, transferring to University of California, Los Angeles to complete her doctorate in History, specializing in Western Hemisphere and Indigenous histories, where she was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and anti-colonial movements. From 1967 to 1972, she was a full time activist and a leader in the women’s liberation movement that emerged in 1967, organizing in various parts of the U. S., traveling to Europe, Mexico, and Cuba, documented in Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975.

In the wake of the 1973 Wounded Knee siege, Roxanne joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council, beginning a lifelong commitment to international human rights and self-determination with non- governmental participation at the United Nations. Appointed as director of Native American Studies at California State University East Bay, she co-founded the Department of Ethnic Studies, where she taught for more than three decades. Her first book, The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation, was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indians of the Americas, held at United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Two more scholarly books followed: Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination. Following the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Roxanne was invited to appraise the land tenure situation of the Mískitu Indians in the isolated northeastern region of the country, which soon became a war zone as Reagan administration funded a civil war to overthrow the Sandinistas. In multiple trips in the 1980s to Nicaragua and Honduras, she monitored the human rights and refugee conditions, the story told in Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.

Roxanne’s award-winning book, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, was published by Beacon Press in September 2014, and she co-authored the 2016 Beacon book “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. In 2018, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, was published City Lights Books. Her forthcoming book, also with Beacon Press, challenges the US history narrative of “a nation of immigrants.” She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.

Local Peacemaker Award recipients:

Judge Lina Hidalgo

Lina Hidalgo was raised in an immigrant family. She knows first-hand the sacrifices hard working Texans make every day to pave a better life for their families. Lina was born in Colombia, when the drug war still raged and everyone knew someone who had been kidnapped. Her parents had two goals: to make sure she had a good education and to get the family to a safer place. Lina grew up in Peru and Mexico, where her parents were offered job opportunities, before emigrating to America in 2005. Lina is a proud product of Houston-area public schools and, as her parents dreamed, was the first in her family to attend college in the U.S. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in political science the same year she became a U.S. citizen. Since arriving in Texas, Lina has been committed to giving back.

Lina has dedicated hundreds of hours to our County’s most vulnerable communities—from her time at the Texas Civil Rights Project to serving as a Spanish-English medical interpreter at the Texas Medical Center and supporting immigrants in search of lost loved ones. Over the past few years and while pursuing a joint degree in law and public policy at NYU and Harvard, Lina conducted research on criminal justice policies and coordinated with advocacy groups and governments to push for criminal justice reform. Before that, Lina worked throughout Southeast Asia to promote transparency and accountability by supporting journalists, bloggers and artists. She helped create and fund a program to bring Stanford students to public policy positions and has served the immigrant and incarcerated communities at any opportunity and in various states.

Egberto WilliesEgberto Willies is first and foremost a political activist who believes it is imperative that we make the government live up to the ideals of the country’s founding document once and for all, we-the-people. He is the host of the multimedia program Politics Done Right, on KPFT 90.1 FM Houston and other networks. Willies serves on many boards including Coffee Party USA, KPFT, Indivisible Houston, and have served Move to Amend and several others.

Egberto is a University of Texas graduate with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. He worked for several oil service companies culminating with a space station project at NASA. He subsequently formed Willies Computer Software Co. where he developed over a dozen communication products used in the public sector as well as in every industry in the private sector.

As a vocal critic of our political and economic systems who believes it is essential U.S. citizens step up to claim their country, Egberto decided to lead by example. He reduced his living expenses, virtually gave up his profitable company, and started blogging full time at his website egbertowillies.com, writing at dailykos.com the largest progressive website in the country as a permanent contributing editor, and producing & hosting Politics Done Right at politicsdoneright.com. He is currently developing a political program in Spanish as well.

Undies For EveryoneIn 2012, Rabbi Amy Weiss formalized a loosely organized annual undies drive into Undies for Undies for Everyone (UFE), a nonprofit whose mission is to enhance the self-worth, dignity, hygiene and success of disadvantaged students by providing them with new underwear.

Since 2012 UFE has led this mission in service of hundreds of thousands of young students each year. Distributed directly through school district partnerships, and indirectly through collaboration with local nonprofits and other organizations, UFE removes a significant hurdle for students by providing this very basic need.

In its first year, UFE provided 3,000 pairs to one school district. In 2019, more than 275,000 students will receive more than 300,000 pairs of underwear from agency “Back to School” events and school nurse distributions. The need for this basic dignity and dearth of nonprofits recognizing the importance of underwear make Undies for Everyone’s work an important piece in assisting school children.